He surely wasn’t thrilled to see James go off on one of his trademark runs, but Morris didn’t hate Boston’s defense early. Yes, James scored 21 first-quarter points, but he needed to make an unsustainable rate of jump shots to do it, including one seemingly impossible 3-pointer over Marcus Smart.

“I was very, very, very, very happy with the defense we were playing on him,” Morris said. “They weren’t getting easy layups, they were fading from threes, fadeaways. Like I said, he’s a great player, but we have to live with those shots. It’s the easy ones we have to take away. I’ve been saying that from the beginning. We gotta expect him to make something, and he did a great job of that. But at the end of the day, we got the win, and we were successful at the game plan we put in place.”